A Darkened Stage
by SilentPoetic
Summary: All the world's a stage, and all the men and women are merely players... [Oneshot, HCa postseason 1. Songfic based on Nickel Creek's Reasons Why.]


**Disclaimer:** Show and characters are property of FOX. "Reasons Why" Lyrics property of Nickel Creek. Words and situations property of me. No copyright infringement intended on my part or allowed on yours. Thanks :)

Faux concern is apathy of the worst sort, Allison Cameron decided, searching through another set of medical records. Why did everyone have to pretend they knew how she felt? All they wanted to know was what the widow of a cancer patient was still doing working at a hospital. As if she didn't _mind_ watching other people die.

No, it wasn't about the death, but the resurrection. (House would have had something to say about the subtle Biblical references she just made.) She was far from perfect. She knew better than anyone that she was destined to fail, and it seemed it was in these times that he would pick up the pieces. Despite herself, she couldn't help but find solace in this unstable fraction of certainty in an uncertain world. Like somehow, he could mend her past by changing the present...

One thought a lot about these things when alone at ungodly hours.

_(Where am I today? I wish that I knew)_

"I wonder if he's still here?" she whispered to herself, as though the sound of her own voice silently reverberating through the glass office would break the disquieting feeling of isolation.

She pushed the papers back into a neat pile at the corner of her desk and got up. Cracking the door slightly, she scanned the hallway for other impressions of life. Sighing heavily, she leaned back to shut the door.

_('Cause looking around there's no sign of you)_

Then she heard the sound- the solid _thud_ of his cane on the cold tile. You couldn't detect it during the day, in the organized chaos of doctors on schedules treating screaming patients. But at night, it was as naturally comforting as the colorful chorus of insects and birds. He'd always hated birds.

"What are you still doing here, Dr. Cameron?" he inquired, stopping as he approached her.

"I could ask you the same thing."

"The chairs here are comfier than the ones at my place."

It was so like House to skirt around the truth, even if it was the answer to a simple question.

_(I don't remember one jump or one leap)_

He must have sensed her resentment, although his interpretation of her emotions rarely dictated his actions.

"Want to get some coffee? Wilson got the nurses to unlock the lounge."

Cameron nodded in reply. Oddly enough, she wasn't tired. Spending countless hours fixated in one spot, with subconscious contemplations of your presence in and relative to a large building, could trick you into believing you were exhausted.

He didn't wait for her as she hurried to lock up the office. He had the disadvantage, after all.

Slinging her coat over her shoulder, she hastened her steps to join him. Now, she was adding a harmony to his sounds as they both walked down the empty corridors.

_(Just quiet steps away from your lead)_

He flicked on the light, limped over to the coffee-maker, and without a word, proceeded to make the pot. Cutting the power on, he left the machine and situated himself in a chair across from Cameron.

They came to a mental agreement, and for a time, they decided the current state of silence held a greater sense of security than if either of them were to begin speaking. Then House cleared his throat.

Oh, here it was- the infamous question. Or something like it.

"Why are you still here?"

"Well, I was doing some paperwork for the McKlellen case..." She could play his game sometimes.

"What I _meant_," he began, "is what are you still doing, working here as a doctor?"

She let out an uneasy laugh. "You really want me to answer that? Or do you just want me to lay my heart out on the table again so you can examine it, give yourself one more selfish reason to believe I'm damaged?"

She swallowed the words. She hated to say them; she hated to say anything to anyone that had possible negative repercussions. But it was the truth. And that, she realized, was something she had over House.

_(I'm holding my heart out but clutching it too)_

He seemed unscathed by her reply. "But surely after your husband died... I mean, don't you have an unprecedented prejudice against every other doctor?"

He was so tactful.

"We knew he probably wasn't going to make it. I don't blame the doctors for what did or didn't happen," she said softly.

"So whom _do_ you blame?" he asked.

"You're going to make this about religion again, aren't you? I know you have just as little faith in God as I do. He gave you that..." She broke off as her eyes found his leg. "Or do you really blame her?"

_(Feeling this short of a love that we once knew)_

The pot began to boil ferociously behind them. They both got up this time.

"I forgot the question," he muttered sarcastically, returning to his seat.

It was probably all as well that he was refusing to respond. She had regretted asking him anyway.

"It's terribly stuffy in here," she stated arbitrarily. "You ever go up to sit on the roof?"

_(Calling this home when it's not even close)_

It was never difficult to slap a label on someone, (although the consequence of such was harder to scrape off than those stupid price stickers.) She was "pretty-but-damaged"; he, the "misanthropic jerk". For now, they played the parts with clouded realism and grace. But that was the thing about acting; if you paraded around in a facade long enough, people were bound to see you as a character, not a person.

She was stronger than most of them believed her to be. She knew he was perfectly capable of unrequited love and genuine sympathy. And yet, they were entirely content to sit upon their separate stages and collect bills for their one-person shows.

_(Playing the role with nerves left exposed)_

House pushed the "up" button with firm intent. The elevator slid open and they stepped inside.

Without looking at her, as though the question was no more significant than the lighted numbers above the door, he asked, "Did you love him?"

Why was it that when he was the one initiating conversation, he knew exactly what _not_ to say?

"Once again, you want me to slip and say something that will further prove your egotistical little theory." She glanced back at him, half expecting a snide comment, half praying that for once, he would keep his mouth shut.

"Of course I did," she sighed. "I sacrificed the rest of my life to make the last of his something worth dying for. I know when someone is worth holding onto, even when it kills you to have to let go."

_(Standing on a darkened stage, stumbling through the lines)_

The distinct _ding_ of the elevator signaled that they had reached their destination. The door opened once more, revealing a small room with a flight of stairs.

Cameron hated where this discussion was going. She would have been perfectly at ease to engage in all manners of pointless small talk and sardonic banter. It was the absence of that reassuring familiarity that was currently causing her rethink the decision to accept his well-intentioned invitation to a drink. Worse still, she regretted the invitation she had made to him to join her on this roof.

"It's nice, isn't it?" she put out, pulling her coat over her shoulders. Her elbows resting on the edge of the wall, she peered out across the New Jersey landscape. It made her feel something undeniably clichéd. It was the feeling of seclusion from a world full of broken promises, inevitable disappointment- a world she lived in every day. Here, she was above the pain and suffering and death.

_(Others have excuses, but I have my reasons why)_

Reaching up, she let her hair loose and brushed it back with her fingers. Headaches were unwelcome guests, especially at 2 a.m.

"You look... nice with your hair down," he said matter-of-factly. "Did he like it like that?"

The insufferable pronoun: it was almost as blunt as that pathetic question.

"_He_ had a name," she replied callously.

"And?"

"It was David."

"David Cameron," he repeated to himself. "That is, assuming you kept his name."

She felt her stomach tighten and tears well up in her eyes. Nodding faintly, she added, "I had wanted to grow up, have a family. I hadn't even thought about anything past that." She paused. "Then I fell in love. I married him because I _loved_ him."

That's all there was to it. Case closed. He could put down his stethoscope, his tubes and needles and all that other medical crap.

_(We get distracted by dreams of our own)_

He coughed into the night, produced the bottle from his pocket and forced the pills down his throat.

"Love is just a euphemized word for severe emotional attachment," he mused. "The person lets you down, you let them go, and all of a sudden, you're crying into your pillow over something that's doesn't even exist."

"Love isn't about the fear of loss or disappointment, House," she asserted. "It's about knowing that what you have is worth more than the risk of losing it all."

Turning back to the sky, she hid her trembling face in the cold shadows.

_(But nobody's happy while feeling alone)_

Even he was worth the plunge.

_(And knowing how hard it hurts when we fall)_

And she was holding onto him because everything else in her life had fallen beneath the stage. She was holding onto a hypothetical idealization- the chance that he would return the embrace. Whatever he had said about her husband was the fabrication of the nerves and confusion sewn into a night she was trying desperately to forget. Whatever he had said about her, maybe it was true. She wasn't the way she used to be.

But she would never have tried to change him. People who attempted to change others were wasting time fulfilling an empty promise to themselves. And if they really wanted what they couldn't have, they should just go find someone who was perfect...

_(We lean another ladder against the wrong wall)_

Cameron threw her head up to the stars and planets and all the other other cosmic matter. She had to believe there was a Heaven, for the sake of her husband, though apparently God had more significant things to do than restore the soul of a hopeless, faithless woman. She would never admit it to anyone, but with all the sufferings she had blindly endured, the fragments of which were still lodged deep within her heart, she needed more than just straightforward reassurance to renew her belief in "The Creator of the Infinite, Indefinite Universe"- she needed a miracle.

Of course, she saw them every day- those momentary glimpses at the impossible. But they were never hers to have. She was only a minor participant, and that used to be enough.

_(And climb high to the highest rung, to shake fists at the sky)_

She needed a miracle, but House was afraid to love her because of what he thought she was, and she couldn't make him love her because of what she wasn't. It was a vicious cycle, an unfounded principle with a feeble existence stemming from awkward silences and casual lies. And it was just another act in their play. No matter how oft-rehearsed, eloquent, or profound, what did it matter if in the end, they really said nothing at all?

He met her at the wall. He didn't speak, but she felt his breath fuse with the autumn wind and disperse, leaving traces of him behind in places she would never go.

Then he walked away.

_(Others have excuses; I have my reasons why)_

To the indiscriminate stranger, they were two lovers sharing a bittersweet goodbye.

The audience never knew the whole story.

Neither did he.

_(With so much deception, it's hard not to wander away...)_


End file.
